Described by Mary Jo Firth Gillett as "poems that explore with unflinching verve the universal questions."
Excerpt
from "what Birds Dream"
Only in dreams so we know
the freedom of unencumbered arms,
of refined touch
and fingered caresses,
those clutching frontal embraces,
where we can feel each others' hearts beat through unfeathered skin.
Professional Reviews
Pearl Kerrar reviewing
BOOK REVIEW
Medusa In Therapy
by Jeanne Wagner
Poets House Press
Stockton, California
ISBN:
review by Pearl Karrer, CQ Editor
Medusa In Therapy, Jeanne Wagner’s recent chapbook from Poets House Press, uses Greek mythology, the Bible, and tales from the Brothers Grimm as frameworks for intimate poems about women. The main body of poetry flows in couplets spiced with slant rhymes and enjambment; this pairing of lines adds to the intimacy that Jeanne develops with great attention to details. The women step outside of their frames and become part of our everyday world: Jeanne’s mother, pictured in a party boat on the River Styx with “Cruising Down The River,/ accordion style, crackling from//a speaker;” Mrs. Icarus, as someone seen each day, “shuffling through the house with her flattened slippers,/ flushed face, hennaed hair;” Medusa, “just another/ girl with a hair cut//prinking in the mirror;” her children, phallic symbols described as “silly kids in a ruckus/ of desire.”
Each poem invites the reader with compelling first lines: “Penelope’s Song,” with “At first I was furtive, unraveling only at night;” “Glass Slippers,” with “Yes, I bared my sole,/ but I could be modest too;” Angels On Parade,” with “I watched them hover like teachers bending over/ our desks, breathing out their silence.” Interest builds with Jeanne’s fresh imagery, her use of unexpected words like “juddering,” “incanabula,” “solipsist.”
“The Dance of the Seven Veils” reveals another aspect of Jeanne’s talent, her ability to build on nuances from many sources. Here she chooses a very structured form to write about a rigid Muslim culture. The pantoum has roots in early Persian and Chinese poetry and is built on quatrains. This line grouping suggests four walls and confinement. Her choice of Salome evokes images of ancient Palestine. Jeanne makes this form her own by changing a few words in the necessary repetition of specific lines. Normally the second and fourth lines in the first stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza, a pattern followed until the last quatrain. Her changes advance her theme. For example, the fourth line of stanza one, “I’ve learned my motions well, I play my part” becomes “I’ve learned my motions well, I move by heart” in the second stanza. “I wear one veil for each two years I’ve lived” in stanza 2 is “I shed one veil for each two years I’ve lived” in stanza 3. The veils by stanza 4 represent lies and are tossed aside in the final quatrain.
Medusa In Therapy is finely crafted, a collection to savor. It follows Jeanne Wagner’s The Zen Piano Mover, the 2004 winner of the NFSPS Stevens Poetry Prize. Her chapbook can be ordered via Jeanne’s e-mail: jeannewgnr@sbcglobal.net.
BOOK REVIEW
Medusa In Therapy
by Jeanne Wagner
Poets House Press
Stockton, California
ISBN:
review by Pearl Karrer, CQ Editor
Medusa In Therapy, Jeanne Wagner’s recent chapbook from Poets House Press, uses Greek mythology, the Bible, and tales from the Brothers Grimm as frameworks for intimate poems about women. The main body of poetry flows in couplets spiced with slant rhymes and enjambment; this pairing of lines adds to the intimacy that Jeanne develops with great attention to details. The women step outside of their frames and become part of our everyday world: Jeanne’s mother, pictured in a party boat on the River Styx with “Cruising Down The River,/ accordion style, crackling from//a speaker;” Mrs. Icarus, as someone seen each day, “shuffling through the house with her flattened slippers,/ flushed face, hennaed hair;” Medusa, “just another/ girl with a hair cut//prinking in the mirror;” her children, phallic symbols described as “silly kids in a ruckus/ of desire.”
Each poem invites the reader with compelling first lines: “Penelope’s Song,” with “At first I was furtive, unraveling only at night;” “Glass Slippers,” with “Yes, I bared my sole,/ but I could be modest too;” Angels On Parade,” with “I watched them hover like teachers bending over/ our desks, breathing out their silence.” Interest builds with Jeanne’s fresh imagery, her use of unexpected words like “juddering,” “incanabula,” “solipsist.”
“The Dance of the Seven Veils” reveals another aspect of Jeanne’s talent, her ability to build on nuances from many sources. Here she chooses a very structured form to write about a rigid Muslim culture. The pantoum has roots in early Persian and Chinese poetry and is built on quatrains. This line grouping suggests four walls and confinement. Her choice of Salome evokes images of ancient Palestine. Jeanne makes this form her own by changing a few words in the necessary repetition of specific lines. Normally the second and fourth lines in the first stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza, a pattern followed until the last quatrain. Her changes advance her theme. For example, the fourth line of stanza one, “I’ve learned my motions well, I play my part” becomes “I’ve learned my motions well, I move by heart” in the second stanza. “I wear one veil for each two years I’ve lived” in stanza 2 is “I shed one veil for each two years I’ve lived” in stanza 3. The veils by stanza 4 represent lies and are tossed aside in the final quatrain.
Medusa In Therapy is finely crafted, a collection to savor. It follows Jeanne Wagner’s The Zen Piano Mover, the 2004 winner of the NFSPS Stevens Poetry Prize. Her chapbook can be ordered via Jeanne’s e-mail: jeannewgnr@sbcglobal.net.
Andrena Zawinski in Poetry Magazine.com
Jeanne Wagner's The Zen Piano-Mover "is a collection to savor," according to Mary Jo Firth Gillett. The savvy of the poetic devices of simile and imagery feed the hunger for more, as in the mover's "walnut sheen of skin/wet with perspiration,/corded muscles, like levers, guiding his motion/past all gravity and pain."
Savor the crisp, clear narratives that moves sensitive moments with poetic muscle along each page inviting the reader into an intimacy as in "Dressing the Lady": "My mother always dressed/in the closet./ A 60 watt bulb,/ like a small, misshapen moon,/shining overhead." Savor the internal gift given by way of the poet's reflection" "After that, I began to listen,/whenever someone used bare/as a transitive verb,/spoke of dressing a wound,...And learned that pudenda/is Latin for shamed/ --for limbs grafting, bellies swelling,/seeds ripening out of reach.." Savor the "pungent syllabls of musk/and ambergris," or "..watching dust motes,/galactic in the luster of the fanlight..." Savor it all. Jeanne Wagner's poetry has been deservedly honored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies in one truly moving moment after another in The Zen Piano-Mover.
Contraband Marriage, traveling along the hemline of loving after incarceration, is a love story written in lyric and free form, set in reality with a different ever after.
